Bulge Formation via Mergers in Cosmological Simulations

TL;DR

This paper reviews how cosmological simulations are beginning to resolve bulge structures, focusing on merger-driven bulge growth and the role of feedback in reducing bulge sizes, with implications for galaxy formation theories.

Contribution

It evaluates the effectiveness of feedback mechanisms in preventing bulge growth during mergers in cosmological simulations, highlighting current limitations and future directions.

Findings

Mergers can reduce central concentration in dwarf galaxies due to feedback.

Current stellar feedback models struggle to produce small bulges in massive galaxies.

Feedback and possibly AGN activity are needed to match observed bulge properties.

Abstract

The latest generation of cosmological simulations are on the verge of being able to resolve the structure of bulges for the first time. Hence, we review the current state of bulge formation in cosmological simulations, and discuss open questions that can be addressed in the near future by simulators, with a particular focus on merger-driven bulge growth. Galaxy mergers have long been assumed to produce classical bulges in disk galaxies. Under this bulge-formation model, though, the high rates of mergers in Cold Dark Matter galaxy formation theory predict many more classical bulges than are observed. Furthermore, simulations of galaxy formation continue to generally produce too massive of bulges. Feedback offers a promising avenue for reducing merger-driven bulge growth by maintaining high gas fractions in galaxies and ejecting low-angular momentum gas driven to the centers of galaxies. After reviewing the results of relevant research that has been published to date, we use cosmological simulations to explore the ability of feedback to reduce or even prevent bulge growth during mergers. In dwarf galaxies, mergers actually reduce the central concentration of galaxies as the induced burst of star formation drives out low angular momentum material. This result shows the potential for feedback to reduce central mass growth. However, we also demonstrate that it is very difficult for current stellar feedback models to reproduce the small bulges observed in more massive disk galaxies like the Milky Way. We argue that feedback models need to be improved, or an additional source of feedback such as AGN is necessary to generate the required outflows.